I would say that Times Square was the central hangout for Burroughs, Kerouac, and myself from about 1945 to 1948.
— Allen Ginsberg
I recommend for any basic course on the Beat Generation to familiarize yourself with 'The Idiot,' Prince Myshkin. He was Dostoyevsky's idea of the most beautiful human being he could imagine, the creation of a saint in literature.
I have been wrathful all my life, angry against my father and all others. My wrath must end. All my images now are of heaven.
Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.
America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.
Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!
My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
The motif of Beat Generation is basically misunderstood, a misinterpreted area. There's this superimposition of the idea of a social rebellion, which was the communist interpretation through Lawrence Lipton.
Black musicians were imitating speech cadences, and Kerouac was imitating the black musicians' breath cadences on their horns and brought it back to speech. It always was speech rhythms or cadences as far as the ear that Kerouac was developing. All passed through black music.
I was putting on a stiff upper lip and trying to fulfill the obligations I thought were demanded of me, taking over my father's role of taking care of my mother... and having to be the recipient of her confessions and emotions but of a delusional nature.
Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.
The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.
The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.
Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.
You see those guys wearing baggy pants, descendants of the parachute pants, wearing an odd, weird Frankenstein haircut. It all comes out of Peter Lorre.
I am 23, the year of the iron birthday, the gate of darkness. I am ill.
I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.
America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.
Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.
